In Our Time - St Thomas Aquinas

Episode Date: September 17, 2009

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life, works and enduring influence of the medieval philosopher and theologian St Thomas Aquinas with Martin Palmer, John Haldane and Annabel Brett. St Thomas Aquinas' ideas remain at the heart of the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church today and inform philosophical debates on human rights, natural law and what constitutes a 'just war'.Martin Palmer is Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture; John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews; Annabel Brett is Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, we'll be discussing St. Thomas Aquinas. He was the most important medieval thinker in Western culture on both philosophy and faith. He was a radical, and he turned the prevailing theology of the church upside down. He sought to bring revelation and reason together, taking the work of Aristotle and developing it within a Christian framework. All human beings by nature desire to know, he wrote. He championed man's ability to understand the world through the senses

and by the application of reason to such experience. However, he acknowledged that certain elements of the divine, such as the Trinity, remained beyond the reach of reason. In his extraordinary prolific career, he formulated proofs of the existence of God, positive ideas about individual morality, and outlined a system of ethics, including the conditions for a just war. After his death, he was condemned, then canonised. His work lives on at the heart of

theology of the Catholic Church today and continues to inform philosophical debates and subjects such as natural law and human agency. Joining me to discuss Thomas Aquinas is John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at St. Andrews University. Annabel Brett, senior lecturer in history at the University of Cambridge, and Martin Palmer, director of the International Consultancy on Religion, education and culture. Martin Palmer, can you tell us something about his youth and adolescence, his background? Well, the background is quite extraordinary because the period of Aquinas, he's born in 1225, is probably the wealthiest, most industrial, most urbanised period in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. Tremendous wealth, growth of cities, trade is growing.

It's a very confident culture. It's also a country. It's also a country. It's also a culture that's in touch for the first time with an enormous swath of the rest of the world. You have Muslim and Jewish philosophers in Spain and their materials flowing into Europe. You also have a Pope who is writing letters to Mongolians in China, asking for help against the Muslims. There's a tremendous sense of a bigger world. Also, the West has conquered Constantinople in 1205 and is occupying an area that it had previously had very little contact with the Latin world with the Greek world. You have universities, as we would recognize them now, begin to emerge in Paris, Cologne, Naples, and Oxford. And you

have also a sense that the world is much more complicated, much more fascinating than it's been for a very long time. And at the same time, you have the rise of a radical form of Christianity, challenging the old models of medieval Christianity in the form of the friars, the de the Franciscans are radical. They are against the wealth of the church. They are, in some cases, condemned as heretics. So it's a world in which, in a sense, almost everything is up for grabs,

and that's the world he's born into. And he's born into an aristocratic family who offer him as an oblate to the local, or Montecasino, Benedictine church, which is one of the way the wealthy aristocrats increased their wealth because they put him there in order to, one way and another, get him to be abbot and control vast land. and vast wealth than add to their own. Exactly.

And he went as an oblate and then went to... Well, then it all went wrong. Then he went to the University of Naples. That's right. He goes to the University of Naples. Well, he goes to Naples because Montecasino is actually attacked by one of his relatives, Frederick II, who was the Holy Roman Emperor, was only occasionally holy, and was quite one of the most dramatic figures of this culturally changing world. So he goes to Naples, and very much the plan of his family.

have been that they would put him into the church, he'd become a wealthy abbot and would contribute to the family coffers. Instead, he is converted by the Dominicans. And then when he's sent in 1244 to Paris to study, his family kidnap him. And it's actually the earliest case we have of an anti-cult program against a young person because the family lock him up for two years in the family castle and try and break his will to join this cult. I mean, I think one has to see the Dominicans and the Franciscans being viewed by sort of average Christians as a cult. What were they doing?

They were denying all the advantages of the power of the church. Eventually, despite various attempts, including sending in very beautiful women to try and seduce him. It's too Hollywood for me, Martin. No, there are various accounts. He even goes out of them with it. We could do without the beautiful women. Anyway, he gets true. You're just jealous.

Melvin, it's just jealousy. He's surrounded by myths. He was such a great man. They're all over the play. Anyway, no mind. He isn't, and he isn't. I mean, I think there is, what is wonderful about Thomas

is that he is actually this extraordinarily stolid figure who kind of, he's called the dumb ox when he's at Paris under Albert the Great, because he just is this solid man. So yes, there are myths, but I quite like the story that they try to seduce him. Anyway, he escapes from the family. He goes to Paris.

to Paris. And everything changes. John Holden, can we take up the story in Paris and can we elaborate on that excellent introduction by Martin giving us a tour d'Orizant? Well, let's talk a little bit about the intellectual environment that he enters into in Paris. We've heard before it's a period of enormous change. The universities are coming into being to serve principally the purpose of providing people for the church. The church is going to be the principal administrator of society, so it's not just as well religious functions. They're going to have civil service-like functions. The universities are getting established. The dominant intellectual tradition still is that of Augustinianism.

That's to say the synthesis of faith and reason represented through the works of Augustine and others, which draws more on the platonic tradition of philosophy, a kind of dualistic picture of Earth, below heaven above and so on. But in part because of the contact with the Middle Eastern world and the Arabic commentaries and so on, which we'll perhaps say more about, something is starting to filter through. About 20 or 30 years before he gets to Paris, there's been an instruction initially by a council and then affirmed by a pope that there may not be any instruction in the work of Aristotle or his flossy of nature, so called. By the time Aquinas

returns to Paris a little later on, it's now being required that one study Aristotle. So it's a period of transition in which, first of all, we've got the university, we've got the ordinary clerics, we have these houses of these friars, we've heard about, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, curiously set up in town, preaching to the poor, but also engaging in study. He comes in on the wave of that, and he starts to pick up the sense of an intellectual revolution. that is going to be advanced in the next stage when he moves from Paris to Cologne to study with Albert the Great

and we can say a little bit more about that in a moment if you like. So we have the flowing in from the East, we have, through the great Arabic scholars and philosophers and contributors, not mere translators, that's flowing in. We have reaching back to Augustine at the end of the Roman age, fourth fifth century, and then he reached back even further over to Aristotle.

These three staging posts, and then they sweep up. as Martin intimated earlier on, into Paris, into the medieval world of thought. And he meets the teacher Albertus Magnus, Albert the Great, who

is himself a great philosopher canonised in 1941, it took 700 years, doesn't matter, and who finds in this large, silent man, a most extraordinary pupil recognises it immediately and

asks him to be, I think this is it, this is recorded, Martin. Has people following around, making notes of everything he says. Right, Sean. Yes, so what happens is he started out at the University of Naples, we've heard. Then he meets, in Naples he's met the Dominicans. The Dominicans move them on to

Paris, where he's going to study. He's a part of a Dominican house there, a priory house, and he's studying within the university. But he's recognised to be very bright indeed, and so he's moved on to where their greatest teacher is, probably at the time, which is Cologne, where we have Albert the Great.

Albert the great recognises in him somebody of enormous ability. You know, we have this, he's called the dumb ox, and Albert says, but this ox, his be held throughout the whole of Christendom. What Albert does is Albert himself has engaged in the project of trying to refound Christian theology on a new basis, not so much the platonic one as we'd heard before, but a new Aristotelian one. Albert has recognised the potential of Aristotelian philosophy

quite broadly to provide a better philosophy of nature, a foundation for science, but also for theology. So he is himself engaged in this project. He recognises in Tom as somebody who has the ability and who's come along at the right time, encourages him in that project as well, a signs to him that has said secretaries to take down whatever it is that he says. And he begins a period of study there in Cologne,

which I last think three or four years. years and then he's going to be moved on yet again. Arbett recommends that he go back to Paris to engage essentially in doctoral research, which will lead up to getting his doctorate and becoming a professor. What was the turning point, John? I still am not quite clear. You say that, let us say in 1200, just for sake of ease here, Aristotle was not acceptable on the curriculum.

50 years later he is central to it. What's gone on to make them change their minds? And who are them who changed their mind? Hostility to Aristotle persists all the way through Aquinas' life on the part of the so-called secular clergy. These are the established officers of the church. But we've heard that we've got a kind of an ecclesially revolutionary movement here, these new religious movements going.

So he's already existing within a culture of radical change on the style of living of those in holy orders and so on. But what happens intellectually, I think, is this. Albert has seen that the philosophy of nature that Aristotle provides, the account of how the world is put together and how it operates, is a much secureer foundation for understanding the world than had been the platonic, and idea and systems worked out of Platonism.

And remember, one of the things that the West has seen is the tremendous success of Arabic and Islamic philosophy and technology. And so this is a society that's rapidly developing, needs to develop new technologies and so on, and it's seen an alternative intellectual system at work in its science and in its technology, and that also has an impact, particularly on Albert, who's very interested in science.

And they did take in Aristotle Anabel Well, Brad, can you tell us, just take up the point that John Holden was saying, how they took in the philosophy and technology from the Arabic world and why that was important to them. It's been described as a rival system of thought. And so they wanted to adopt it, I presume. But you'll say it better than that. Yes, that's right.

I mean, it's not simply the texts of Aristotle, which are being translated in Muslim Spain, particularly in Kordoba, and coming through to the West from there, Initially translations are actually from the Arabic. Later on we get direct translations into Latin from the Greek. But it's also the work of the commentators, the Arabic commentators, in translating Aristotle's principles into a workable model of science. So particularly important here are the 10th century commentator Avicenna

and the 12th century commentator Averroes, particularly. He was known as the commentator. And they're reading these works, Aristotle's work, along with Averroes' explication of them. And it's really a Verroes who plays a crucial model in making it into a workable science, making this a curriculum that can actually be taught at a university. So it doesn't just come as kind of unformed texts of Aristotle.

It comes as already a working body of knowledge that they can take up. And this body of knowledge that are interested in many things, science is very important, of course, technology becomes important. There's also the notions of the created and the uncreated work. world. Can you develop that? Absolutely. So the range of Aristotle's writings, as commentated by these Arab mediators, goes from works of natural science and those in both a very narrow sense. So there are pseudo-arastatelian works like on plants and on minerals, but there are broader

works like the physics, which are genuinely Aristotelian, through to the ethics, and later on in the 1260s the politics, although that was never actually part of the formal curriculum. So it's the whole world of natural being, including man as a natural being. And this is what creates the tension with theology, because for theologians, Christian theologians, nature isn't just nature, it's created nature. And man isn't just a natural being. He's a spiritual being.

He's made in the image of God. So this autonomous inquiry into nature and natural being that was going on at the arts faculty with the help of the human, these obviously non-Christian Arab commentators, it was very, very challenging to the theological authorities. And as John has already mentioned, this carried on throughout Aquinas as life. There were condemnations issued in 1270, 12702,

and 1277 by the Bishop of Paris, Etienne-Tampier, condemning over 200 aristotelian propositions, one of which was the idea that the world is uncreated. Another important one was the idea that you could, as a human being, attained the supreme good, which was the life of the philosophical contemplation, in this life. So these these are fundamentally challenged

the temporal framework of the Christian understanding of the world, and these were seen as particularly theological challenging. Just to find, not final, but to put one more little piece in the Zixar, the Augustinian view, which this was challenging, which several hundred years before, had accepted and absorbed Plato, and so it was almost as if,

Aristotle was being called up. He hadn't been translated at the time Augustine. He was translated in the Arabic book, to challenge Plato. So there was something again, there was a rivalry and a challenge, and it was the Augustinian platonic view. Yes, absolutely. I mean, part of the way that Augustine handled this inherent temporality of the Christian framework, so Adam Feld, Christ redeemed us, we shall be saved.

There's a temporal line, an eschatological line that takes us back to God. Part of the way that Augustine handled that was with the platonic metaphysics that have already been mentioned. God is the supreme good and he's the supreme being. And evil is not something fundamentally a fundamentally different principle. It's simply the privation of being. It's non-being. And that meant that Augustine could bring into the Christian framework, this idea of a distance between being and good and God and non-being and evil. and we find our way back to being and to God through our redemption from Christ

and through our pilgrimage through this world. But that sense of journey, which we have in Plato himself to some extent, we journey up from the cave, which is this place of shadow of being and not being up to the light of the forms. In Augustine, the just struggle through this world on pilgrimage back to God. Aristotel doesn't have that sense of journey at all, that metaphor. What he does have is a teleology. He has the idea that we are dynamic agents seeking our end.

And so one way of putting the project of reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with Augustinian is how you can fit Aristotelian teleology, which isn't essentially temporal, into a framework of eschatology, which ultimately is. Right, now can we talk about the big thing that he seemed to me he tried to do with John Holland, bringing faith and reason together? as I understand it the challenge he undertook was to synthesise as has been pointed out

Aristotle within the Christian framework right can you give us an example of how he said about that yes let's think about this in terms of our knowledge of ourselves and of the world and of God and so on so maybe knowledge is the way to begin with this

just to make the link with what's already been said why this is very challenging I think is that in the platonic scheme there really isn't too much to be said about the world, the material world and so on. All the action happens, as it were, in the abstract domain of ideas and of intellect and so on. Whereas what Aristotle is pointing to is the idea that the world, the world with which we are familiar, has principles of operation built into it.

So there really is something, we can explain what goes on in the world by looking at the world itself and studying it. We don't have to look somewhere else to some set of ideas, abstract ideas and so on. Now, that can seem very challenging because if we're looking at the world, as in some ways explaining what goes on, there's a fear here that God might drop out of the picture. And in fact, within the Arabic tradition, it's rather ironic that just more or less at the point at which these commentaries are handed over to the West

or received into the West, this almost marks the end of philosophy within the Arabic tradition itself. And one of the reasons is that the Aristotelianism is seen within Islam as a threat, and this leads to condemnations of the philosophers that kind of brings philosophy of that sort to an end. So why doesn't it do so for Aquinas? How is it that he's able to salvage this and achieve beyond salvaging this synthesis?

Because he has a model of how it is that we understand the world, everything that goes on within it, in terms of what's been in Wales mentioned, these teleologies, this directionality of things, working out their own nature towards certain ends, expressing themselves, growing and flowering, as it were. But what he says is this, that while it is the case that the world is made up of this system,

of interacting substances developing, and we can think of a garden, if you like, while it's like that, it's not self-explanatory. If we ask the question, where is all this growing to, and what is where the source of the growth, that ultimately things are not self-explanatory.

Because if we ask the question, where does this directionality come from? At one point he says, it's like, you see an arrow flying through the air towards a target. Well, an arrow doesn't do that of its own accord. There must be behind it an archer. who set up the target and who's fired the arrow at it and he brings God back into the picture, as it were, as this great, as this gardener

or if we were to use the musical analogy, as this conductor and composer. And in this he tries to weave together brilliantly, I think, both philosophical ideas, ideas from scripture about creation, about fall. He never abandons what's good in Augustine as he sees it. He never abandons what's good in Plato. He is this fantastic effort and, you know, works relentlessly at it. to bring together the best that's been said and thought into a single coherent system. Martin Palmer, how radical was that?

And can I ask you again, can we just push this? Because I'm sure listeners would like to know as much as I would like it, as clearly explained as possible. It seemed to me that Augustine was saying that God was in us and it was innate. And Aquinas is saying, as Aristotle, you have to go through external observation. We can see a microphone in front of us. But to find out what is behind it, we have to discover, uncover, find the secret.

And going from outside, inside, we will get there. It doesn't be emanate from the inside. Now that's really crude. So you're going to say it much better than that, please. Well, I'll try. But it is, I mean, these are extraordinarily profound issues. I mean, if we go to some of his five proofs for the existence of God, I think that gives us a very good starting point.

And John's already spoken about the arrow and the archer. And really what Aquinas argues, is that by observing the world, we can draw out certain conclusions which lead us to something, which he has this wonderful phrase, which we therefore call God. And this crops up at the end of each of his proofs,

and I rather like that, this notion, this is what we call God. So, for example, everything is, everything moves, everything is animated. And by studying the animation of the world, the way that things come into being, are born, or grow,

die, decay and so on and so forth, we have to conclude, argues Aquinas, that before they are able to move, there is that which moves them. But that which moves them is itself unmoving, otherwise there would be something behind that which was moving it.

So if you like, if you observe the natural world, you are driven to conclude that there is behind every action in the universe, there is that which initiates the action, and that, to use Aquinas' phrase, is what we call God. And ditto, as John's also indicated, if we look at causation, if we look at consequence of actions,

there has to be an initial cause, because otherwise, how does it all start? And we're back to really the questions that bedevil us to this day as well. What is there before time? And what is there, and that was a crucial, question, both for the Arabs and also for Aquinas. What happened before anything happened?

And if there was no happening, what is God? And there you get this extraordinary debate about the eternity of the world. Did the world start at a specific time, which is, of course, what Genesis claims, or does the world begin because God is? and therefore the world is as eternal as God. And that was one of the fundamental challenges, both to the Muslim notion of a point of creation, and of course to Augustine and to classical Christian thought.

It's sometimes into me reading for this prayer in that, he was more interested in a first cause than in God, because you'd say, and this we call God, et hoc dissimus day, thank you very much. Et hoc disimus de lais. And so, but he was after a word. a first cause, but can I, so that's very clear, can I just come back to John Holden

for a moment and then move on. This business, he's linking the material and the spiritual, isn't he? He's saying, he's taking reason. It's almost a contradiction, isn't he? It seems to me, anyway, and I don't know anything. He's saying, these are the five proofs of God, and he reasons the

proofs, he reasons the proof. Aristotle's reasoned this one, and yet he believes in Revelation, which you could say is at the polar end of it. It's another way, but it's, it's It doesn't obey the laws of reason. It's not susceptible to them. So how does he square that?

Well, you see, again, maybe it's helpful to begin with a contrast with Augustine. Augustine thinks, in a rather poetic way, Augustine thinks that each human being has within them an innate desire for God, that this is somehow implanted in them as part of the creation, that they know God antecedently, that somehow deep within them is this sense of God as father or whatever, and that they crave this. He says, you made us for yourselves, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they come to rest in you, says Augustine.

Aquinas does not think that there is an innate desire for God in human beings. He thinks, along with Aristotle, that there's an innate desire for our highest good, but we do not know what our highest good is. We have to discover what our highest good is. Aquinas is not a philosopher who avails himself of a whole series of first principles. what he begins with his observation. We observe ourselves, we observe the world around us and so on. Now what we do when we observe ourselves is that we are creatures who are impelled forward. What are we impelled forward by?

Well, like any other living thing, we're impelled forward towards our completion as a thing of that kind, just as a plant, as a seed is impelled through the various stages of growth towards blossoming and fruit and so on. We find ourselves impelled, but what are we impelled towards? What is our highest good? Well, in order to find out what our highest good is, we need to find out what the highest principle in the world is. We need to begin with things and probe the question,

what explains things? Now, this business of a first cause is probably just worth emphasizing this because I think there can be some misunderstanding. It's not as if he's working his way back in time to a first cause. He's not saying, where did this come from? Well, what happened prior to that, what happened prior to that, what happened prior to that? He's interested in that question. But by a first cause, he means something that explains whatever is going on.

Now, even if the world had come into being a moment ago, we'd still have the quest for a first cause, namely an explanation of the existence and character of the world. So it's not a search for a first cause in time. It's a search, as it were, upwards, for a first principle that controls and explains and causes everything to be. Now, what he says is when we pursue that inquiry, we find that, indeed there is a first cause. About its nature we can know nothing other than it is a first cause, that would answer our desire for our own highest good.

And now we've got this other thing, which is scripture, first of all, Hebrew and then Christian scripture, that tells us something about the nature of the world in its spiritual dimension. And this now is married together because we discover that God is both the cause of the existence of the world, but also existed in a special relationship with the covenant of people of Israel and now exist in a special relationship with all mankind. But that's revelation.

Philosophy couldn't have told you that. I've got to bring in Annabel, unless you, what you're going to say is of such urgent stop press. No, no, no, not at all. No, not at all. I'm just still interested in the interjection of the divine into this reason. But Annabel, this idea is he did try to address all the questions in the universe. And this, what we've been talking about also has relevance to politics, the political context of the time.

Can you draw over what's been said by Martin John into that area, please? Yeah, I mean, you can address it directly through questions about reason and revelation. So, I mean, if we're asking what governs this world, in the first instance, it's reason. And if we ask, well, whose reason originally, that's God's reason. but the crucial point for Aquinas is that we participate in God's reason and he uses this quote from the Psalms, The light of thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us. Signed upon us.

Like an impress of a signet ring stamped. And so it is of our essence to share in God's reason and be able therefore to share in his governance of us. So we are capable of self-direction. insofar as we are able to participate in God's overall direction of us. So Aquinas has a very strong understanding of the rational agent capable of morally directing himself towards his own goods and of knowing what those goods are by the light of natural reason.

And Aquinas takes over from Aristotle that this rational being is also a political animal, that in order to fulfil the potentialities of reason that are inherent within our nature, we need to live within society. And then that society itself needs to be governed, and again it needs to be governed by reason. So the second reason that we consider here is the reason of the ruler of that political community,

the king, but it could be a self-governing political community as we saw with the city-states of northern Italy that existed at the time. But the important point about political reason is that it's not totally autonomous vis-à-vis natural reasoning. every law that the human ruler makes, through his particular reason, has to be consonant with natural law.

Otherwise, it does not have the character of law, and there are grounds possibly for disobedience and possibly even for resistance and the removal of a tyrant. So that's one thing about the political domain. It's not a fully autonomous vis-à-vis natural reason, but on the other hand, neither is it fully autonomous vis-à-vis revelation. because our end as human beings isn't simply to live in this city, to live a flourishing natural life.

We have a supernatural end which is with God, ultimate beatitude. But we can't get there by ourselves. And this is why we need revelation. First through Moses, that was the old law that was given to the Jewish people, now through Christ, which is the new law, which is given to us. And so the second way in which human law is limited is in relation to that other end, which goes beyond our natural end, to which we are directed by divine law.

And this gets political when we think about who it is who directs to our ultimate spiritual end. Because the reason revelation comes, you can almost say, in the king and the pope. Exactly, exactly. So that's why the join is so wonderfully neat, isn't it, the reason revelations? Anyway. Yes, although Aquinas is very, very delicate. he does not want to, in one of his works, the de Regan, he does have a clear statement that the king's, a king should be subject to the Pope as to the Lord Jesus Christ himself. But, in fact, it's much more delicate than that. Aquinas doesn't want to reduce the sphere of the political human life together.

He doesn't want to reduce it either to the life of natural morality nor to spiritual kingdom. This is not a theocratic thesis. It's a thesis about a delicate balance between the, the sphere of human reason in which human reason could be autonomous and the areas in which the human ruler will need to take his direction from the Pope. So it's a very complex interrelation, and I think Aquinas is relying on the subtlety of Christian reasoners to get that balance right in the circumstances. Martin and then John.

Well, I think both what Annabel and John has said is fascinating in terms of why Aquinas is overturning conventional Christian thought. Because if we take the point that John was making about no interest really in time, that is an obsession of the Christian church. And as Annabel pointed out, we have this eschatological story,

this sociological story. Adam falls, Christ saves, we're redeemed. And therefore, when Aquinas brings in this notion that time and a sense of a salvationary history is not that important, he is fundamentally challenging things. And I think also this is why he's sometimes accused of creating a world that doesn't actually need salvation, doesn't actually need a Christ.

And I think Annabelle's point about the political is, again, deeply threatening to a feudal church. So what Aquinas is doing, and I think Annabelle's put it beautifully. Why because he's a little bit of, because in a sense, the feudal has the notion of compliance and authority and structures of responsibility which are not questionable. You know, if you are a serf, you owe duty to your Lord. If you're a Lord, you owe duty to your king. And if the king says we're going to war, you go to war.

Aquinas actually throws into the midst of this. But what if it's not a just war? Not if it's a war that goes against what you, as an autonomous individual with reason, also living in a world of revelation in which the Trinity and salvation through Christ have been given to you, what if you decide the king is wrong or the emperor? is wrong, deeply profoundly challenging, and yet he manages, as Annabel put it, he walks this delicate line, and although he gets condemned after his death, not within less than 100 years of his birth, he has made a saint, and somehow he pulls off the most astonishing

intellectual reversal and yet manages to carry most of the church with him. It is an astonishing achievement. I think when slight danger of overstating the extent of the extent which he's revolutionary. It's understandable because what we want to, if we talk about this great synthesis of faith and reason, what we've been doing up to this point is emphasizing the reason side of this, showing this is somebody who's reaching out to,

particularly to an Aristotelian conception, which people would have thought was probably incompatible with Christian beliefs. So it is very radical to take on something that, and indeed, as I say, the Arabs had found, was incompatible with Islamic belief, as they supposed. But where he ends up is in rather

theologically orthodox positions. I mean, from the point of view of the present day, if you like, and we can move forward this in a moment. He's really quite a conservative figure in that sense. He's not, in its own time, it seemed fairly revolutionary. But just to perhaps illustrate this, see, if you take the issue of morality, for people who believe in divine commands,

such as are given in the Decologue, the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not this, that, and the next thing, the question arises, an ancient question goes back to Plato, does God command this because it's good, or is it good because God commands it? And there's a long tradition that says that the goodness of something that is commanded by God is good simply because God has commanded it.

He's the sovereign. That's what makes it right to do it. Aquinas takes the opposite view. Aquinas says, no, God commands these things because they are good. And that's a debate in the Middle Ages and he's on one side of it, if you like, he's on the rational ethics side of this

rather than the divine command side of this. Having said that, however, he is engaged in a serious synthesis. He doesn't want to let go of those things. So he has to work in, again, like the order of providence, the way in which God works in the world through sacred history and so on. He's going to work that in. And in fact, very interestingly, if we move forward a little bit,

subsequent to the Reformation, when Catholicism has to re-articulate itself in response to these challenges presented by Lutheran others, there's a council is called the Council of Trent. which produces the catechism, it restructures the mass, it introduces seminary training, all sorts of innovations within the church. But Aquinas is turned to again and again within the context. I mean, this is 200 years after his, 300 years after his life,

but he's turned to again and again as a source for this synthesis. And in a way you could say the catechism of Trent of the 16th century is, in a way, Aquinas's last great work, because it represents the synthesis into a church document now of the kind of ideas that he, he had developed. Annabel, can we take that in the political... Well, it is in the political sphere

at the Council of Trenticles. Certainly. What John was saying about the conservatism, the balance that you were talking of so eloquently has been slightly disturbed by what John said. Yes, well, as I say, Aquinas had no political programme.

I think he was relying on, as I say, subtlety and the conscience of Christian rulers, but that could not always be relied on. Yes, politically speaking, his political ideas were taken up by the same theologians, principally Iberian theologians, who are so prominent at the Council of Trent.

But they didn't quite leave his doctrines where they were. So if you think about Aquinas' idea of the political community is we're all reasoning beings, we have to live together, therefore we need one reasoner to do the reasoning which will pull us all together. But it's not a thesis about power. And Aquinas didn't. really engage in any of the polemics over the respective power of the Pope and the power of the king.

But this is where the debate is now situated by the 16th century. So what the Dominicans, the Spanish Dominicans later followed by the Jesuits do, is to transform Aquinas' understanding of political community as a community of reasoning beings as a community which is the source of power in that community. And power is then transferred up to the ruler who holds, that power in the name of the community. So as Aquinas have talked about the ruler governing, the community or having the care of it,

for the Dominicans and the Jesuits, and for a lot of the revolutionaries of the 16th and 17th century, this becomes a thesis about popular sovereignty, about power being essentially located in the people, rather than just there to govern the people by reason. So it's radicalised by categories of power in a way that Aquinas would never have wanted it to be done.

Art in power, he was incredibly prolific, and so on, but towards the end of his 1890 volumes of summer theology, but he wanted his life, he stopped writing, and it said that he had a revelation and said his writing wasn't worth straw compared with the revelation. Can you tell us about that?

Well, it is one of the well-recorded stories, Melbourne, of his life, that on December 6th, 1273, at mass, something happened. We have no description of what it is, other than that he seems to have had an experience of God, of the love of God. He doesn't define it. And he just is incapable of speaking afterwards. And his menuensis is wanting to carry on with the Sumo Theologica is saying,

come on, you know, we should continue writing. And eventually he says, there are no more words. And when he's pushed further, as you've just said, he says, after what I have experienced, all my words are straw. You do have this, I find this is why he's such a fascinating character. Here is this man who all his life, and he dies shortly afterwards in 1274, has written 8.5 million words trying to reconcile reason and revelation, creating this extraordinary synthesis,

and when he actually experiences that about which he has been speaking, he is speechless. And I have to say, as a theologian, I've always taken that as a very strong. Talitory warning. What do you make of it, John? Well, one thing that should be said is he doesn't say burn my works or throw them away. So I think that it's not, when he said all this as a straw, he's not saying I was wrong in everything I said, which you could imagine.

You could imagine somebody having an experience as a result of which they say, look, all of that was just nonsense. He's not saying it was nonsense. I think he, and in fact, he does write a little bit subsequent to this event. there is something else that it doesn't amount very much. But I think that it wasn't that he was rejecting it. He was saying, no. I mean, think about straw, for example, in the Middle Ages. I mean, straw might be used, for example, with mud in fashioning something.

You can build with straw. But what you can't build is something that has the great, you know, the soaring strength of a great cathedral. For that you need stone. And I think what he was saying was this. Look, the reality that I have been seeking to strive towards, and we all are, our completion, this full. flowering as it were, is something that is of which we only have a dim sense.

It is living, sharing in the life of God, whatever that means, it's sharing in the life of God, it goes beyond words and so on. Now, what I've done up to this point is, whereas in the human domain, it's there, he's not rejecting it, but I think he's saying that what lies ahead of us, our completion, is something that words cannot begin to describe, and isn't itself in that sense articulable? It is an enduring experience of love or whatever it may be. Anabel, what do you make of it? Of his revelation and his subsequent almost total silence.

How do you fit that in with his work? Well, I think much as John would have done. I mean, if we wanted to take it back to these two ends of man, I mean, I think that Aquinas would have thought that he'd actualised his contemplative intellect. He'd flourished as a rational being as much as he could in this life. but that's not the only flourishing that a human being is capable of. There's a flourishing that we can't even imagine in this life,

even though we are naturally directed towards it. And that sense of going over, and the gap between those two ends, that's sort of immeasurable gap, I take it, sort of hit him with immense force. Thank you very much, Annabel Brett, Martin Palmer and John Haldane. Next week we're talking about the feud, between Sir Isaac Newton and Godfried Leibniz over who invented the calculus.

Thank you very much for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.